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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Embedded programming i.e. automotive, industrial, aerospace. The problem is they pay poorly in comparison to web dev but are a lot more stable long term.

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I have done almost 0 web development at 3 of the FAANGs and am quite satisfied with the pay. I don’t think web would have paid better. I’ve done OS type work (system daemons, libraries etc), embedded, mobile, etc.

Then there are people who work on compilers, image recognition, AI, browsers, server work of all kinds, etc etc. the variety, depth, and scale of work is much larger than web and can pay better as it can require a deeper level of expertise. I’m sure there exist web developers who make more than people who work in these spaces just as the converse is true. I don’t think it’s possible to say which pays more. Web dev may be an easier avenue to break into things with a low amount of experience though.

That's cool but the thing is FAANGs are absent in most countries outside of the 2 US coasts and a few major tech hubs in Europe. Everywhere else, most of the SW industry is just CRUD/build-an-API-for-this-shitty-JSON type of work.

Compiler/AI work and the rest exists where I live as well but it's strictly in academia, not in private companies and has a high barrier of entry as it's mostly PhDs or post-docs and is also paid poorly.

Web dev work you can find in pretty much any major city in the world.

For example, in a city nearby to me there's a major VR/AR headset company which I'm pretty sure solves really interesting problems. The issue is, what happens when you want to change jobs but want to stay in the same city as that city has no VR/AR hub so there's no other demand for specialists in this specific niche.

Don't know why this was downvoted. As someone living in Europe, this comment is exactly why I stay in my cushy, very well paying and super boring and frustrating backend job. In the backend world, there are dozens of employees who would be happy for me to come work for them, while market for interesting work with similar is very shallow here (a very limited selection of FAANGs, what else?). I don't want to move to the US (mostly because the US visas seem designed mainly for people in much worse situations that I currently am) and the European market is just too shallow to build any more advanced coding career - unless you're ok with low salaries, little savings and coding until you're 60+ years old. I don't love coding that much.

Where do you live in Europe if I may ask that pays well enough for backend dev as not to work until you're 60?

Genuinely curious as I'm open to a move.

I'm from Poland. Of course, everything depends on the conditions of the retirement that you're comfortable with. For me, it's 5000 PLN ($1300) a month till I'm 85 years old + paid-off house. The 5k PLN should be very comfortable assuming no children, which I don't want. Assuming ultra-safe investing to only protect the principal (i.e. no return above inflation) and wanting to retire at 40, you'd need around 2,500,000 PLN ($650,000) to achieve that + buy the house to retire in. Let's call in 3,000,000 PLN ($780k) in total.

If you look around a bit, as an in-demand (meaning - chasing the latest tech fads, maybe some tech lead experience as well) senior backend developer, you can get take home 250,000 PLN per year on a long-term (meaning usually multiple years) contract basis. Assuming 60,000 PLN of that goes to living expenses, it takes less than 16 years to save up the required 3m PLN to retire. And, if you're really hot in terms of CV, you can take home much more than 250k per year. Also, there are options to contract in Western Europe or get six figure remote US job (this one's harder than the other options) for more pay.

You're way underpaid, even by Polish standards. You can easily get a remote job e.g. at German company that pays 70K-90K+ EUR.

I was giving net numbers. Assuming I pay 19% taxes in Poland on that remote job income, the range you've given translates to 240k-310k PLN net.

Also, I myself happen to make over 400k net PLN per year, but I didn't want to use myself as an example, as I only know a handful of people who make that much - so it's perhaps not something you 100% can count, whereas the 250k per year number is absolutely attainable by any senior dev with reasonable/modern CV and good negotiating/job hopping skills.

would you mind naming the German companies paying 90K+€. I know quite a large number of people working in really big companies in Germany, which are considered very well-paying, and while 70-90K is certainly standard, anything else requires taking up management roles, which are not necessarily remote and not so many.

I live in germany here you can earn a decent salary if your in one of the mayor cities.

What's a decent salary in numbers and can you afford to buy a house there with that amount?

That’s true. Outside Silicon Valley there’s probably not as much non-web dev work. I still think it’s out there. Banks exist everywhere and my brother has worked in a European bank for a long time. FAANGS also have offices all over Europe (London, Paris, and Berlin) doing non-web work and even before COVID if you were senior and talented enough remote work was an option. Now remote work for all companies has simplified drastically.

I have worked on mobile OS, PC software development, web, machine learning problems, and now VR. I’m not particularly worried about getting pigeonholed because any company I’d want to work for can recognize the value of a generalist - I’m not going to solve hard domain-specific problems but I can architect the SW and plug all the pieces together and dive into domain-specific problems when necessary. To be fair though I’ve heard this concern from other people who want to move back to Europe, but the framing was different - how do I explain to them what I do in a recognizable manner.

It's a nice area

However some places are 10, sometimes 20 years behind into best practices, be that in coding, tools, PM practices, innovation, etc.

There's a reason a lot of mobile phone companies closed down (as an example).

As much as I like the area I don't miss staring at a hodge-podge of C/C++ code done in weird style that might or might not have been auto generated and will as many memory bugs as possible.

And how many of those are going to let you in without at least a decade of experience in the specific domain, and real world experience with whatever guidelines or practices they use (i.e. MISRA for X).

Maybe all of them? I worked in Automotive right out of university and they trained you for everything you need to know including C programming tricks and MISRA and they hired pretty much anyone with generic programming knowledge as long as you were willing to learn.

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